What is America?

Alberto Paramo just might be the American Dream. The son of illegal immigrants from Mexico, he’s successfully built three businesses from the ground up. He also started a foundation to help young people build a career in the trades.

Immigration is Alberto's key issue—and, in my opinion, his stance is pretty reasonable. He thinks we should enforce the rules that we've got in place, as well as creating a bipartisan path to citizenship for those who are already in the country.

So I wasn't expecting what happened next. I posted a short video of Alberto on social media to get people excited about the interview. It blew up, garnering millions of views and thousands of comments. Not gonna lie, some of them were pretty mean-spirited.

So...is immigration actually the issue that's dividing America? Is it actually what the 2024 presidential election was about? This week, we're talking about immigration, entrepreneurship, and smoking cigars in a pontoon boat on Lake Wallenpaupack.

How’d we get so lonely? Turns out, it wasn’t the invention of DoorDash 🤷🏻‍♂️🍟

Over the last sixty years, the amount of time Americans spend on social activities got cut in half—down from 13 hours a week in the 60s to just six hours a week today.

So what happened? And what do we do about it? 

In his landmark book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam introduces the idea of social capital, the network of relationships among people who live and work in a society—relationships that enable that society to function.

Social capital is down across the board in America: across all age groups, races and religions, education levels and tax brackets. But all is not lost. This week, we're talking about Putnam's book, how we got so isolated, and how to rebuild our nation's social connective tissue.

LINKS

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam (Book): http://bowlingalone.com/

Join or Die (Netflix Documentary): https://www.netflix.com/title/81746809

Last Exit to Elsewhere (YouTube clip): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7sIgpXguVk

For the last thirty years, Mari Walker has been a nurse in Northeast Pennsylvania 👩🏼‍⚕️💟

She started out working in hospitals; since then, she’s also spent time in addiction and hospice care.

When I asked her whether the US healthcare system is ready to meet the challenges it faces, her answer was simple: No.

According to Mari, the story is one of misaligned incentives. Instead of being optimized for patient outcomes, the US healthcare system is built to deliver profits to insurance companies and private equity firms. As a result, we pay more than any other country for our healthcare, but our health outcomes are conspicuously not great.

The great thing about Mari is that she’s a builder. She loves to roll up her sleeves, get in there, and fix what’s broken. She says we can fix the US healthcare system, but it’s gonna take some doing.

[Side note] To learn more about the futuristic home I visited in upstate New York, check out the link below:

https://www.thecatskillproject.com/

How would you define the American Dream? 🇺🇸🤔

How about this: You come up with a new way to target prescription drugs to specific kinds of cells in the human body. You apply for a PhD and get accepted. You do your research and file your patents. Then you found a series of companies that will make your idea a reality and help improve people’s health outcomes.

That's the story of Nasser Nassiri Koopaei. He’s a serial biotech entrepreneur based out of the University of Florida’s Innovation Hub. While he was still a PhD student, he won a big ideas contest and used the prize money to start his first company. Since then, he’s started four more biotech companies, each of which is advancing the frontiers of science.

Something else you should know about Nasser is that he’s from Iran. He immigrated to America to start his companies here. 

This week, we’re talking about nuclear nonproliferation, the American Dream, and the dangers of extremism, at home and abroad.

Crumbling classrooms. Plummeting SAT scores. Teachers near the poverty line. What happened? 😲

Ten years ago, Florida's education success story was the envy of the nation. Thanks to the hard work of Republicans like Jeb Bush, Florida’s fourth graders had risen from near the bottom of the charts to sixth in the nation for reading and fourth in math.

Then came the budget cuts. Under Governors Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, funding per student was cut by nearly 14%. In plain English, that means Florida spends 14% less per student than it did twenty years ago, not including inflation. That’s about $3000 less for every kid, every year.

The results are sad. In the last ten years, Florida has erased all its gains. In 2024, Florida’s math scores hit a 20-year low, and reading scores dropped to their lowest level since 1999.

To find out what happened, we're talking to Dawne Morison. She taught first and second graders at a Gainesville public school. Today, she’s an administrator at the University of Florida’s early childhood education program, where she supports and trains teachers.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the news these days—to give up and go into your hole. 🙈

But Mikhail Mikhaylov decided to do something. He's a college senior at the University of Florida, a Russian-American student who's fighting for Ukraine.

In addition to his demanding coursework, Mikhail is a co-founder and president of URI, the Ukraine Rebuilding Initiative. It’s a group of about 40 undergraduates who are working to help heal and rebuild the city of Nizhyn, in Northern Ukraine.

In concrete terms, they’re helping with things like building bomb shelters at bus stops and obtaining prosthetic limbs for Ukrainian veterans who’ve been injured in the war. Mikhail even worked closely with Gainesville Mayor Henry Ward to establish a sister city relationship with Nizhyn. 

Just curious, what were you doing in your senior year of college?

On this week's podcast, we're talking about universal healthcare, affordable housing, and whether it's OK to name your kids after yourself 👀

Joel Elliott has a uniquely American story 👦🏾

He grew up in Miami’s Overtown Neighborhood, which he affectionately refers to as Swamp City and Rat Town. As a kid, he was known as Lil Smurf; he loved skateboarding—he idolized Tony Hawke—and he loved to go with his mom to catch mullets in Biscayne Bay.

Then, at the age of 13, he was incarcerated. He spent most of the next 35 years in prison. I wish Joel’s story were an outlier, but it’s frighteningly common here in America, where the imprisoned population is greater than 2 million.

The deal is, Joel was not set up to succeed. As he describes it, he grew up in a war zone. He was often hungry; he didn’t have enough to eat. He and his six siblings had to sleep on the floor at night so they didn’t get hit by a stray bullet. They had to walk past dead bodies on their way to school.

We need to think hard about whether that’s the kind of society we want to live in. And—if it’s not—what are we gonna do about it? How do we make it so kids in Swamp City have better options? How do we treat people in our prisons humanely? How do we help them get back on their feet after they’ve paid their debt to society?

What if we gave America a blood test? 🩸

When you go to the doctor, they give you your numbers for cholesterol, blood pressure, body fat percentage, the whole deal. If you’re regular about getting your checkups, you can track your numbers over time.

This week, I read a book, and I think of it kind of like a blood test for America. Like...how much money do people have? How long are they living? Can they afford a home? Medical care? College?

After World War II, our blood tests were looking good. America’s numbers kept going up, year after year. But now, they’re not going up anymore. In some cases, they’re actually going down.

The book is Adrift, by Scott Galloway. The author argues that America succeeds when we’ve got a strong middle class. But, beginning in the 70s, we started cutting our investment in the policies and institutions that build a strong middle class—and now we're living with the results of those cuts.

This week, we're talking about blood tests, shareholder value, and the new season of The White Lotus 💮

When we talk about politics, we tend to use the word “should.” Like, we should level the playing field. We should work to correct historical inequalities.

But we don’t do as good a job thinking about how federal policies will impact individual people—people like Owen Williams.

Owen is 66 years old. He's a retired exterminator and the quintessential dad—right down to the Dodge minivan and the Colonial Williamsburg t-shirt. He and his wife Lynne and their three kids grew up on a quiet street in Gainesville, Florida.

Back in 1991, he lost his job because of affirmative action. For the next five years, he struggled to make ends meet. He worked three jobs—delivering packages, delivering pizzas, and landscaping—and slept just 4-5 hours a night.

It was a formative moment for Owen, politically. These days, he is deeply suspicious of government and worried about a ballooning national debt.

This week, we’re talking about property taxes, fact-checking your way through fake news, and French prostitutes on strike 💃

Life can be confusing and difficult for a 24-year-old in America. Especially if you happen to be a queer black woman living in the South, and you’re working three jobs.

But somehow, in the midst of everything, Kaya Lewis is finding time to build community with her neighbors and cook healthy, delicious food for people who are hungry.

Kaya is the founder of Kaya's Kitchen, an organization that coordinates volunteers, as well as monetary and food donations, to prepare and deliver meals to people who need them. To date, they've raised nearly $4000 and delivered hundreds of meals. (If you'd like to support the great work Kaya is doing, check out her GoFundMe, linked below 👇)

This week, we’re talking about food security, voter suppression, and The Princess and the Frog 👸🏽🐸

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-kaya-provide-free-meals-in-memphis